Buzzfeed reoorts that the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee is spending as much as it’s taking in: $10,757,609, to be exact, according to Federal Election Commission data. The money is mostly being spent on fundraising efforts and for a digital campaign that the group’s campaign director told BuzzFeed News is modeled on the vaunted Obama operation. It’s also providing a salary for Vernon Robinson, the campaign director, who has made nearly $236,000 from his work so far for the PAC, according to FEC filings.
It’s not unusual for people running a campaign of some kind to make money. But the committee only categorizes a small percentage of its disbursements as salary payments. The payments in this case haven’t been listed as going directly to Robinson, and have been classified as fundraising expenses. The recipient is listed as “Tzu Mahan” — in some cases, “Mahan, Tzu.”
Tzu Mahan is Vernon Robinson’s consulting and strategy firm. It has one full-time employee: Vernon Robinson. The firm also has “various subcontractors,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.
Asked why he didn’t just list his own name on the FEC documents as a payroll expense, Robinson said, “When Dr. Carson wins the presidency, we want everybody to know that Tzu Mahan is running the strategy.”
Three big trends have decisively changed the Republican Party over the past decade, weakening its ability to win presidential elections and gravely inhibiting its ability to govern effectively if it nevertheless somehow were to win.
First, Republicans have come to rely more and more on the votes of the elderly, the most government-dependent segment of the population — a serious complication for a party committed to reducing government.
Second, the Republican donor class has grown more ideologically extreme, encouraging congressional Republicans to embrace ever more radical tactics.
Third, the party’s internal processes have rigidified, in ways that dangerously inhibit its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The GOP can overcome the negative consequences of these changes and, in time, surely will.
The ominous question for Republicans is, How much time will the overcoming take?”
I share your feelings sir, and then I shared them on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest! These Republicans/Teaparty members are thorns in the flesh of America’s progress!
Mr. King took to twitter and expressed his frustrations with the hypocrisy that is the Republicans Teaparty members in this country. The same folks who call themselves “Christians,” but are quick to turn their backs on the least amoungst us – the kids crossing the borders trying to escape the turmoil in their country!
What would Jesus do?
These are Stephen King’s Tweets;
But, of course you know what was coming. The people King referred to in his tweets decided to defend their hate for the children trying to escape the hardships in their countries. They were not kind to King at all…!
And they didn’t stop there, they continued. But you’ll have to see his twitter feed if you want to know what other crazy things they said to King because of his tweets. I have reached my crazy tweets limit for today!
The Fourth of July is always a great time to revisit what makes the United States a great nation, and I always come back to the same characteristic: Compromise. There is probably nothing more American than our genius for compromise, even more so than apple pie and motherhood, both of which were invented by people who didn’t live here in the first place. But compromise? We are good at that, and the reason I think we’re in the political quagmire we find ourselves in today is because we’ve stopped compromising, and I blame the Tea Party for this situation.
I know the right wing likes to blame President Obama or Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for not compromising when the Democrats had the majority from 2009-2011, but the truth is that all three of them did offer opportunities for the Republicans to support the health care law that, after all, was the brainchild of conservative scholars who thought it a far better idea than what the Clintons were peddling in the 1990s. The same is true for the Dodd-Frank bill and the stimulus package, which had far too many Republican tax breaks and not enough in grass-roots spending to be fully effective. But at least those laws got passed.
The problem today is that the Tea Party-inspired GOP has become the party that has consistently traded the good for the perfect and has come up empty each time. They could have had a grand bargain twice that cut social programs and the deficit, but because it didn’t go far enough, the Tea Party faction in the House wouldn’t support it. The same is true of the ACA, which the right still wants to repeal, and a whole host of other issues where we could actually have made some progress and then improved the legislation down the road, but because the bills required compromise, the Tea Party was not interested.
I fully understand that this is sometimes the way politics goes in this country, but this time it seems different because now the right is saying that they, and only they, interpret the Constitution as it should be analyzed, so anything that runs afoul of that reading is wrong and un-American. This is the dangerous part of their agenda and the one that runs directly against their reading of American history, because they reject compromise of any sort.
This country, plain and simply, was built on compromise. The Declaration of Independence was a compromise that mentioned freedom and equality but didn’t mention slavery. The Constitution was a compromise over commerce, slavery and representation. The run-up to the Civil War included a number of compromises that in the end could not satisfy the southerners who decided that slavery was a protected right and got the Supreme Court to agree with them. Financial legislation, social legislation, immigration laws and even US foreign policy in the era of the great world wars had elements of compromise.
FDR compromised, as did every other president we’ve ever elected. You’d think that Ronald Reagan was some great pillar of conservatism who blocked everything the Democrats sent him over eight years, but he compromised too. He cut taxes and then raised them. He signed a compromise immigration law and a tax overhaul that had both liberal and conservative elements. He bargained with terrorists after saying he would never do that. George H.W. Bush, who I think will be rehabilitated once historians get into the meat of his administration, did the absolute right thing by raising taxes to fight the budget deficit in the early 1990s.
You get the picture, I presume.
Lack of compromise is political suicide, and that’s a lesson that the Tea Party will ultimately learn. The more savvy politicians know that you need to get what you can given the political mood and realities of the times. Then you run on your successes and build on them. That’s how the Republicans ran the country until the 1930s and how the liberals ran things until the 1990s. Since then, what has government really accomplished? It’s so bad now it took the threat of massive disruptions to get a Farm Bill. Bob Dole couldn’t even convince his fellow Republicans to back a measure that would support people with physical disabilities.
We’ll get through this and people will look back and wonder how it ever got so bad. If the Tea Party persists, though, they will become a historic party.
Maybe he’s auditioning for a role on Fox, maybe this is a late edition of a midlife crisis. Whatever it is, Chris Matthews of MSNBC is losing his political grounds and others are beginning to take notice.
In a show last week, Matthews asked Liberals to stop “looking down our noses at teaparty people.”
Why? Because according to Matthews, the Teaparty people are are angry “about the failure of our system.” Matthews then goes on explaining what those “failures” of government are, you know, the things about our government that give the Teaparty people the right to be angry. These governmental failure, according to Matthews, are failure to “control the deficit, the debt and the border. Then the man who sometimes call himself a Democrat asked; “What good is government good at?”
Here is his reasoning;
This looking down our noses at tea party people has got to stop. They have a message. They’re as American as any liberal is. And they’re really angry about the failure of our system. I was over covering Eastern Europe when the wall came down. You know what people didn’t like? It wasn’t the philosophy of communism they didn’t like — it was the complete corruption of it, the failure of it to deliver to working people. That’s what this system is doing right now: We can’t control the deficit, we can’t control the debt, we can’t control the border. What good is government good at?”
If Chris Matthews cannot figure out “what good is government good at,” then I cannot figure out what good his show is good at. There are times when his vast knowledge of politics is apparent, and then there are other times when he ask these dumb questions and have us all wondering, and the dumb questions phase is becoming too unbearable!
Asking what good is the government is the founding principle of the teaparty movement. Those fools would like to abolish everything the government has achieved over the last 65 years, including Civil Rights, Voting, Taxes, FEMA, the Board of Education, to name a few. And they will be more than satisfied running around the streets with their Ozzie and Semi Automatic Second Amendment rights slung over their shoulders, blasting anyone they consider threatening because that person is in a car playing music at a gas station.
Yea, Chris Matthews cannot see the importance of government. “What good is government good at?”
Last week was a busy week for the crazy Republicans trying to take over the government. They had a march on Washington, did you know? Well that’s what I’m here for. To bring your attention to the 30 million people they expected to show up to overthrow the government.
I didn’t know the Republican House Speaker was retiring, and I’m sure he didn’t know he was either. In fact, it was just a month ago when Boehner said he was running again to be House Speaker.
But the Teaparty has other plans where Boehner’s reelection is concerned and their plans include J.D Winteregg – I couldn’t make up that name up if I tried.
J.D Winteregg is running on the Teaparty ticket to unseat Boehner and he is anticipating a win. So confident he is, that he has taken the opportunity to throw Boehner a retirement party, and invited “1,000 of John Boehner’s closes friends and D.C. political reporters.”
According to AATTP, J.D. Winteregg represents the worst nightmare of Republicans in Congress. If any Republican tries to make a deal with a Democrat, their seats will be threatened by a primary challenge.
The Tea Party Leadership Fund Political Action Committee has already spent over $300,000 supporting Winteregg over Boehner.
In a political ad that was released earlier this month, Winteregg accused Boehner of having “electile dysfunction,” and had many immature “jokes” that made a play on Boehner’s last name. The ad played as if it were a Cialis or Viagra commercial, and targeted Boehner for working with President Obama.
This happened in 2010. I cannot remember seeing or hearing about it, but these right-wing hate mongers calling themselves “Christians,” were so against their fellow Americans getting the opportunity to buy private health care, that they gathered in Washington and prayed to God for Divine intervention in killing Obamacare.
And it wasn’t just the regular nuts that prayed, no, the irregular ones prayed too. Georgia Republican Congressman Jack Kingston joined in the insanity.
Amazing, isn’t it. These two billionaire brothers are practically responsible for the Teaparty Movement, convincing poor and apparently ill-informed Americans that having healthcare is a bad thing. Yet, according to Senate Leader Harry Reid and the Associated Press, these same billionaires are benefiting nicely from the same healthcare they are set against – Obamacare.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., renewed his criticisms of the Kochs this week. In a Senate chamber speech, Reid noted that Koch Industries benefited from a temporary provision of the health care law.
The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program, Reid said, “helped the company pay health insurance costs for its retirees who are not covered by Medicare.” Reid asked sarcastically: “So it’s OK for Koch Industries to save money through Obamacare” even as Koch-related groups seek the law’s repeal.
When Congress enacted the health care law in 2010, it appropriated $5 billion for the temporary reinsurance program. The goal was to subsidize employers’ costs for workers who retire before they become eligible for Medicare. Hundreds of employers applied – many were corporations, cities and public universities – and virtually all the money was soon distributed.
“If the Affordable Care Act is so awful,” Reid asked, “why did Koch Industries use it to their advantage?”
Federal records show that Koch Industries received $1.4 million in early retiree subsidies. That’s considerably less than the sums many other employers received. A Koch Industries spokesman said he had no comment on Reid’s latest criticisms.
I think the Democratic Congressman is just calling it as he sees it. They claim that they’re against “big spending government,” but where was the Teaparty when Bush spent us into oblivion?
In an interview with NY1, Rangel said “it’s hard for me to explain how you work with a president that thought that he could really deal with the Republican leadership,” Rangel said. “Maybe it was the water that they drink at Harvard,” he continued, referring to Obama’s time at Harvard Law School.
While Rangel was disappointed with the president, his ire was at its most intense when discussing the Tea Party. If Rangel had to describe the right-wing movement in a word, it would appear he’d have a hard time choosing between “racist” and “mean.”
“They are mean, racist people,” Rangel said of the Tea Party. “Now why do I say that? Because in those red states, they’re the same slave-holding states.”
“They had the Confederate flag,” he continued. “They became Dixiecrats; they had the Confederate flag. They’re now the Tea Party; they still got the Confederate [flag].”
“I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” Rangel added. “There is nothing the president can do – not love of country, not love of party – that they’re not prepared to kill themselves to get to him.”
As Politicker.com notes, this isn’t the first time Rangel has attacked the Tea Party and described the movement as racist in nature. During the Summer of 2013, Rangel said Tea Partyers were “the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police.”
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